This reminds me of a quest in New Vegas, where the NCR contracts you to kill a bunch of Fiends lieutenants. While two of them just seemed like run of the mill, I-don't-know-you-it's-not-personal jobs, for one of them you are informed that he had raped an NCR soldier (female), and that it was personal. Now, I wasn't given any other background and motivation than that, but because of it when I went to take him down I took immense satisfaction in scrubbing his brains off the mojave. I think I even exclaimed something along the lines of 'Take that you filthy piece of shit!' - So there is something to Jim's point about the big R being an ultimate bad guy codifier.

Not exactly a very convincing video, as he basically cherry picks the evidence. Sure murder can be rationalized through the fiction, sure it can be done in self defense, but it can also not be. Nothing stops a video game from using murder in a completely unjustifiable way and many do. On the same token he assumes that rape in games somehow has to be a realistic portrait of actual rape turned into entertainment for no reason, while in reality it could be justified through fiction just fine (see the movie Immortal, Matrix Reloaded or the short story Spar). There is nothing in principle that stops rape from being used in good or bad ways in fiction, just as there is nothing that stops murder being used and abused. Murder just happens to have the advantage of being a little easier to put into gameplay.

I mean seriously, games are fiction and the rules of reality simply to not apply. That doesn't make any use of rape or murder is good or bad, but it means that you can't judge the actions in the fiction without the context of the fiction.

Never thought I'd see this much of biased reasoning in a Jimquisition episode. Rape is a form of torture. It's painful and humiliating. That's it. It does not become more evil because it happens mostly to women or because people are stupid enough to blame the victims.

Moreover, by no means rape is worse than murder. The fact that everyone dies does not make killing more socially acceptable. It simply does not. Rape or any other form of torture leaves psychological damage. Severe damage in many cases for sure. But a person can potentially recover, while once you take someone's life, you take away everything from the person. I mean EVERY THING, including all his hopes, wants, love, joy, future... and the fact that the person is now dead and, thus, cannot suffer doesn't make the crime any less severe. Seriously, what kind of perverse logic is that?

There are plenty of games where you play (or at least where you can potentially play) a complete monster, killing and torturing innocent people. Why would adding rape to those make them less morally acceptable if it makes sense? Just because it makes people feel funny? How does not being a rapist absolve Hannibal Lecter anyway? I loved the character, but I would gladly stab him in the eye with a fork, given the chance, because he is e freaking psycho, cannibal, and a complete lunatic. If it was somehow revealed that he is a rapist, it wouldn't change my sentiments towards him in the slightest. He's about as messed up as any person can get.

Just as a reminder most cases of rape do not happen in dark alleys with "overly sexily" dressed women and anonymous men wearing masks. In most cases the perpetrators are family, friends or relatives. So rape in video games is about as disconnected from rape in real life as murder. As for lack of the "victim" in game killing, it's far from being always the case. Very often enemies cannot really fight you back, just like civilians in Prototype can't do anything to stop the main character from tearing them apart and devouring whole. Do you really think this is better than rape?

I believe that the entire negative attitude towards depictions of rape in media and most prevalently in video games is a form of avoiding the problem. This problem is the attitude towards rape and rape victims in contemporary society. Instead of acknowledging that rape is bad, rapists are the ones to blame, and people who disagree are idiots, society tries to avoid the problem by not showing it in media. "Rape? It's something that happens to those sluttish women in poorly lit backstreets, right? No, no, no, we will have none of this..." Too bad that hand-waving doesn't make the problem go away. And, please, stop saying that they actually care for the feelings of rape victims. Rape victims playing rape games? Are you kidding me?

Just a few last words about people trying to look for the roots of real life problems in their depictions in media. Stop trying to fix stuff on the screen, just go out there and do it in real life instead. Otherwise you are not helping, you're just feeding your own ego by pretending to be conscious of the society's problems.

It's strange.. you compare video game murder to real life murder, but you don't even touch rape in games, and instead go for just real life rape. You say rape is bad in real life, and yes it's a horrible thing, but what about the games that stop people from wanting to do it irl? Some say killing in games helps appease voilent feelings after all, shouldn't it count for rape too?

You raise many good and sort of alright points, but what you're saying basically boils down to "rape is a special kind of evil".

And well, it's not.

It's absolutely horrible but it's not objectively worse than torture, or murder, or basically anything I do for kicks in every sandbox.

As an example, there's the torture chamber in Skyrim which you have the option to purchase and then the option to burn someone alive, heal them of their wounds and repeat 15 times, which I'd probably say is worse than rape on the evil scale. And yet, no one in the media has so far managed to care. You want to know why?

Because people aren't disgusted by it. Sure people think it's evil, but it doesn't make their skin crawl. And so no one campaigns against, people don't care. You make a game with the option of rape and its OH MY GOD THIS SIMPLY A HORRIBLE THING THAT MUST NEVER OCCUR EVEN IN FUCKING STORIES. It's not for any moral or rational reason it's because it disgusts people.

Rape is being chastised as something horrible that affects many people, and it is and it should be. But it doesn't warrant a special mention in the list of things that you should never decipt, partly because such a list doesn't exist and should never exist. Because there's nothing special to it. It's just another way to be a monster.

You know, I want to say that you did a good job at drawing that said line, and for all of what you said I do agree with. I'd say you handled the subject with a respectable and fair tone.I also hope you don't get a lot of flak, but considering this reply will be posted after 17 pages of it are done...well.I hope it wasn't too bad and hope you're having a lot of fun murdering all manner of demons and people and goblins and etc........and beating people in races...if you're a racing kind of guy....Tycoon builders....Sim city.......Educational games.......whatever.

That's the wrong question. The proper one should be: Why should we censor it?

For example if you have a dark fantasy game where you play the bad guy, why shouldn't you be able to rape and plunder your neighboring villages? Could be a great game mechanic, changing troop morals and how other nations might see you. Such a game could be as cartoony as Dungeon Keeper or as authentic as a Paradox simulation.

Essentially, stop thinking like Japanese porn is the only way to use rape in games. Rape has been used tons of times in books, movies and so on, there is no reason why it shouldn't be part of gaming. Even such tame shows as StarTrek/TNG/Enterprise had numerous episodes covering it in one way or another.

Also this whole discussion is just a little late: Phantasmagoria had rape 15 years ago and it was written by a women (Roberta Williams) no less.

That's the wrong question. The proper one should be: Why should we censor it?

For example if you have a dark fantasy game where you play the bad guy, why shouldn't you be able to rape and plunder your neighboring villages? Could be a great game mechanic, changing troop morals and how other nations might see you. Such a game could be as cartoony as Dungeon Keeper or as authentic as a Paradox simulation.

Essentially, stop thinking like Japanese porn is the only way to use rape in games. Rape has been used tons of times in books, movies and so on, there is no reason why it shouldn't be part of gaming. Even such tame shows as StarTrek/TNG/Enterprise had numerous episodes covering it in one way or another.

Also this whole discussion is just a little late: Phantasmagoria had rape 15 years ago and it was written by a women (Roberta Williams) no less.

I hate this show as much as when it debuted. Scratch that, I'm ambivalent about the show, I just still hate Jim.

Rape can be either a mechanic (press X to bitchslap) or a plot device (cutscene). The second one is easy - games are not an inferior medium and should feel free to touch the same subjects as other forms of media. Seeing an NPC rape X is totally permissible.

Rape as a game mechanic is where it gets interesting. All those silly arguments Jim made are essentially a list of the differences between rape and murder. He did have a few good points though..

Rape is a new mechanic in games. We don't know how to implement it so we do it as true to reality as we can. This doesn't apply to murder - few if any games feature medically accurate death, for the most part it's dramatized or underplayed. People do not die easily. We've adapted the IRL death for gaming purposes. Enemies don't take a minute to die after suffering fatal damage. A rape mechanic can be trivialized in the same way murder was.

Now serious and true to life rape can certainly be a game mechanic and a very powerful one at it. The important part would be player choice. Let's that at a certain point there's an option to rape some NPC. We don't want to have that as a generic mechanic that adds +3 to strength and -250 to karma as that would downplay the significance - we want it to be a one-time event in high definition. Full facial and character animations and good voice actors.

So let's assume the player is controlling a psychologically damaged actor so that rape, in the context of the story would make sense. And we offer the player the possibility of raping some NPC. At this point we don't judge, just offer a neutral information that rape is possible. The player rapes the NPC or passes, and we try to make both options as neutral as possible. We don't incentivise either.

Some players will pick the rape option out of curiosity, some will pick it during their second playthrough. Some will decide to rape to get off on it. I'm guessing most won't. At that point we can use this powerful element to develop the storyline in an interesting way. If we're particularly crafty we can kick the player for making this decision. All in all we're creating a powerful emotional device.

Like stated previously, and possibly multiple times(read as far as page 2-3, 17 pages is a bit long) killing is often fast in games, but it's not always the case.

I also would say murder is worse then rape, Death is absolute. There's no possibility to come back from it. rape there is a possibility to be healed both physically and psychologically with time, murder isn't that forgiving. But in games like stated, they do it fast and you just move on, it's not treated with details, you don't see the effects of murdering, and so you don't notice the moral problems with it.

The better ways to portrait the whole "rape vs murder" thing would be to put both on equal ground. How would the public react if there was a video-game where you played as a murderer? Seeing everything from his eyes, slowly stalking a pray, murdering it. and see the family's devastation? See how they suffer, seeing some family members performing suicide and so forth. This would portrait the psychological suffering of the families of the victims, something rape games does not. They don't show much(if any) psychological suffering from the rape. But it's assumed to be there.

Now the biggest reason IMO that rape is taboo, while murder is not. Is because many people either know a rape victim, or know someone that knows a rape victim, and so they have a closer view of the psychological problems in a "real life" perspective, However a murder victim is dead, and can't talk about the experience, and it's more rare to know family members that know other family members with psychological problems after having a close person to them getting murdered. Had it been the opposite, murder would have been considered a taboo, and rape might not have been such a "hot topic".

portal_cat:I think you brought up some good points. Where killing a bad guys most people pay more attention to being a hero then how many people they kill. Where rape is you are the bad guy. Murder can be justified, rape cannot.

I found this video incredibly disturbing.

What disturbs me is all the effort by developers and people in general that goes into justifying murder in entertainment. The thing is, we find the murder in video games entertaining, we turn it into an art and a kill count. We turn people into targets.

I read about someone in the newspaper who said they watched luca rocca magnotta killing Jun Li, and they weren't even disturbed by it because they have seen so much violence in entertainment. That I find truly horrifying, even moreso than reading that magnotta raped the dead body. You can pass off magnotta as a psychopath, or someone who's just sick, but you can't pass off a society that's de-sensitised to murder.

In Mass Effect, there are plenty of occasions when Shepard can murder someone who doesn't threaten him (Saren's assistant on Virmire, who partook in very unethical experiments on live subjects) out of some abhorrent sense of justice.

Who are we, as gamers, constantly engaging in gratuitous violence on-screen, to judge someone who wants a rape game? Neither virtual murder or rape actually harms anyone. In games, we just get around the horror of murder by finding ways to justify, finding ways to de-humanise the enemy.

This is how genocide happens. In my field of study, Political Science, we learn that human beings are inherently compassionate and have too much empathy to allow us to kill others. But the Nazi's or the Hutu's or the Japanese Imperial Council wants us to kill. How do they get us to do it? By indoctinating us into believing those we would kill are not human. The Japanese at Nanjing would later report that they did not think they were committing murder when they killed people in absolutely HORRIFIC ways, they viewed it as nothing more than slaughtering a pig. That's how you justify murder to yourself, and how those in power get others to commit murder.

With all the effort that goes into de-humanising people in video games, just as those of non-white races were de-humanised (Do you think that with all the de-humanisation required to justify slavery, that raping a slave would be considered immoral at the time? It would only be considered immoral to murder, because that would be destruction of property.) it's extremely rich for someone who is seeking a murder thrill and a quick way to justify it, then turning around and saying that murder is acceptable in video games but not rape.

I think what's going on here is that we enjoy killing in video games, and we don't want that taken away from us. However, as moral creatures, we don't want to expand the immorality that already exists in video games, so defend the enjoyable status quo while opposing the introduction of additional immorality in order to feel like ethical people.

Undeadpool:It's certainly a hypocrisy that extends into our (and by our, I mean United States) government as someone who gets caught with some weed PROBABLY would've been better off forcing sex on someone in terms of punishment/jailtime. It's absolutely obscene that sexual assault, unless committed serially or against children, is almost always below double-digit prison sentencing. Not that it would be a GREAT deterrent (people still use drugs despite the harsher sentences), but it would speak well of our society at the very least.

I think Krahulik, unless there's more to that discussion, is starting to go a LITTLE off the deep-end too if he honestly equates rape with killing in videogames. Especially as someone whose family was threatened with both (by people who apparently have absolutely NO sense of irony) during the whole "Dickwolves" insanity.

Because many of rape accusations are false, and are used by women, to get revenge at men they hate. We have seen this happen lots of times. Woman accuses someone who did not do it, the man goes to jail for god knows how many years. It's bullshit, so judges are more critical now and are afraid to get long jail time to someone who did not deserve it.

Machine Man 1992:I agree with Jim. Rape is very much different from murder, in that it is basically an unnecessary act. Murder can be justified in violent or perilous situations,

PEOPLE, LISTEN! MURDER=/=KILLING.

Murder is a specific type of killing. Killing armed combatants in war is not, I repeat, NOT murder. Murder is unjustified killing. A justified killing is called justifiable homicide: it cannot be murder if it is justified. Manslaughter is an accidental killing. And killing armed enemy combatants in war is just called doing your duty.

The term 'murder' really shouldn't set soldiers off, because they (ideally) haven't murdered anyone, even if they have killed enemy combatants.

(Sorry to single you out Machine Man, you just provided an easy example. I realize that by 'murder' in the quote above you probably just meant 'killing' the way I'm using it. My point is semantic. However, it was a point I felt the need to make.)

You are kidding right? Soldiers are as much of murderers as anyone else, in fact they shouldn't even be in middle east, but that's a story for another time... There is no such thing as "justified killing", it's brainwashed idiots lying to themselves that somehow, it's "honourable" for soldiers to murder when it is not. Soldiers are horrible people who are forced to do horrible things to others, including innocents. There is no justification.

Undeadpool:It's certainly a hypocrisy that extends into our (and by our, I mean United States) government as someone who gets caught with some weed PROBABLY would've been better off forcing sex on someone in terms of punishment/jailtime. It's absolutely obscene that sexual assault, unless committed serially or against children, is almost always below double-digit prison sentencing. Not that it would be a GREAT deterrent (people still use drugs despite the harsher sentences), but it would speak well of our society at the very least.

I think Krahulik, unless there's more to that discussion, is starting to go a LITTLE off the deep-end too if he honestly equates rape with killing in videogames. Especially as someone whose family was threatened with both (by people who apparently have absolutely NO sense of irony) during the whole "Dickwolves" insanity.

Because many of rape accusations are false, and are used by women, to get revenge at men they hate. We have seen this happen lots of times. Woman accuses someone who did not do it, the man goes to jail for god knows how many years. It's bullshit, so judges are more critical now and are afraid to get long jail time to someone who did not deserve it.

"FBI reports consistently put the number of "unfounded" rape accusations around 8%. The average rate of unfounded reports for Index crimes is 2%.[2] However, "unfounded" is not synonymous with false allegation.[3] Bruce Gross of the Forensic Examiner's says that:

This statistic is almost meaningless, as many of the jurisdictions from which the FBI collects data on crime use different definitions of, or criteria for, "unfounded." That is, a report of rape might be classified as unfounded (rather than as forcible rape) if the alleged victim did not try to fight off the suspect, if the alleged perpetrator did not use physical force or a weapon of some sort, if the alleged victim did not sustain any physical injuries, or if the alleged victim and the accused had a prior sexual relationship. Similarly, a report might be deemed unfounded if there is no physical evidence or too many inconsistencies between the accuser's statement and what evidence does exist. As such, although some unfounded cases of rape may be false or fabricated, not all unfounded cases are false.[4]"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

I completely agree that rape is entirely different in terms of human perspective than death and murder. The argument he makes is sound throughout. However I find myself in disagreement that comedian Dave Chappelle's comments on his comedy routine were meant to justify the mindset of rapists. What he was trying to do was point out discrepancies in modern fashion by making them funny. It may not be too much of a stretch to connect his comment directly to rape but I highly doubt that was his intention.

Iceismadnice:I completely agree that rape is entirely different in terms of human perspective than death and murder. The argument he makes is sound throughout.

So by that logic a game where you kill people first and then rape them later is totally fine with you? And a game where you kill your victims after the rape isn't all that bad either? Death as ultimate problem fixer?

I was agreeing with Jim's understanding of the different perspectives that men and women have towards rape and how the discrepancy in opinions for rape are larger than murder. The consequences and causes of murder can be understood or misunderstood by both males and females with less disagreement. The social morality of these two actions might have been the conversations fulcrum, but I was commenting on the other aspects revolving around it.

You are kidding right? Soldiers are as much of murderers as anyone else, in fact they shouldn't even be in middle east, but that's a story for another time... There is no such thing as "justified killing", it's brainwashed idiots lying to themselves that somehow, it's "honourable" for soldiers to murder when it is not. Soldiers are horrible people who are forced to do horrible things to others, including innocents. There is no justification.

Haven't been on here in a while... but I'll bite anyway.

First off... this is a generally agreed upon distinction within the ethical community, which is comprised of philosophers with PhDs. If you think you know better then you'd better have a good argument. Which you don't. Your response was really just a series of baseless assertions without any logical inference or factual support.

Okay, someone walks into your house and starts killing your family. You don't have a right to kill them in self-defense? That rather simple example kind of shatters your position. Lol. I also guess we should have stayed out of WWII. Just let the Nazis conquer the world and wipe out everyone they hate, but at least we would go to the death camps with a feeling of moral superiority. Lulz.

I agree that we probably shouldn't be in the middle east, but the politicians are to blame, not soldiers. If your position is so extreme that you're unwilling to defend yourself or your loved ones then I'd say that you're the brainwashed idiot.

I'm not going to argue about what's objectively morally right or wrong because there's no evidence or proof either way. But I will point out that your value system isn't very conducive to you surviving in the real world for very long. If you reject the nature of reality that's your business. Reality doesn't really care. It won't pat you on the head, nor will it spank you. It's just action and reaction.

Pacifists are slaughtered, conquered and enslaved quite easily, and that's reason enough for me not to be a pacifist. You can be a pacifist because you live in a well ordered democratic society that defends you and allows you to express your beliefs. It's a society that has been defending itself through military force for hundreds of years. If you truly object to having your tax dollars go to pay soldiers then you should leave the country, otherwise you're just a hypocrite.

I have a few main problems with this video. First is all the pathetic internet/tumblr/facebook feminists who give an automatic round of applause when they are being pandered to and won't even try to think critically on the subject.

Secondly, Jim, you seem to fall into the same bias as the rest of society when you compare rape and murder. You brought up reasons why murder is okay in entertainment, and those reasons are pretty bad, or very minor. The real reason that murder is okay is that we are desensitized to it. Plain and simple.

Jim, in your video all you did was imply, whether you meant ot or not, is that rape is a sepcial kind of evil. It's not. Evil is evil. Both murder and rape are evil. You make excuses for murder by saying that when you die, it's over. You fail to bring up the fact that the victim might have friends and loved ones who wouldn't be devestated by his/her murder. So no, rape does not merely end with the victim's death. It's more of a compounding problem than you seem to realize.

It's odd how you give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to murder in the media. You say most people can tell between fiction and reality. But you don't give the same credit to people who watch rape in a fictional setting? People are no more likely to be rapists after seeing rape in a game or movie as they are being murderers.

Also, rape IS torture. I found it amusing how you tried to seperate the two.

To all the fools out there who say rape can't be justified. Umm, yeah, actually it can. For the exact same reason you justify a murder. You just make sure you rape the bad guy/girl. What would you think of raping an evil woman who you knew raped other people and humiliated them, causing them lots of scars? Would you find it justified then? The only difference in the scenerio is the use of sex as a weapon instead of guns, and you are using it to punish an evil woman.

Jim, for your sake, I hope you don't plan on inviting any writers of murder or cannibalism in fiction to your house, either.

You are kidding right? Soldiers are as much of murderers as anyone else, in fact they shouldn't even be in middle east, but that's a story for another time... There is no such thing as "justified killing", it's brainwashed idiots lying to themselves that somehow, it's "honourable" for soldiers to murder when it is not. Soldiers are horrible people who are forced to do horrible things to others, including innocents. There is no justification.

Haven't been on here in a while... but I'll bite anyway.

First off... this is a generally agreed upon distinction within the ethical community, which is comprised of philosophers with PhDs. If you think you know better then you'd better have a good argument. Which you don't. Your response was really just a series of baseless assertions without any logical inference or factual support.

Okay, someone walks into your house and starts killing your family. You don't have a right to kill them in self-defense? That rather simple example kind of shatters your position. Lol. I also guess we should have stayed out of WWII. Just let the Nazis conquer the world and wipe out everyone they hate, but at least we would go to the death camps with a feeling of moral superiority. Lulz.

I agree that we probably shouldn't be in the middle east, but the politicians are to blame, not soldiers. If your position is so extreme that you're unwilling to defend yourself or your loved ones then I'd say that you're the brainwashed idiot.

I'm not going to argue about what's objectively morally right or wrong because there's no evidence or proof either way. But I will point out that your value system isn't very conducive to you surviving in the real world for very long. If you reject the nature of reality that's your business. Reality doesn't really care. It won't pat you on the head, nor will it spank you. It's just action and reaction.

Pacifists are slaughtered, conquered and enslaved quite easily, and that's reason enough for me not to be a pacifist. You can be a pacifist because you live in a well ordered democratic society that defends you and allows you to express your beliefs. It's a society that has been defending itself through military force for hundreds of years. If you truly object to having your tax dollars go to pay soldiers then you should leave the country, otherwise you're just a hypocrite.

I don't really care about the Ph.Ds of philosophers or what they agree on. That means nothing in this discussion. The bottom line is, killing IS murder, plain and simple. You can do what the rest of society does and make up garbage excuses to justify it. But if you take a life, you murdered someone. There is no other way around it.

The real question is if you should be punished for it. If you were genuinely using self-defense, then no, you shouldn't. But you still took a life, which is murder, no matter how you want to spin it.

I also find it funny when you say he should just leave if he doesn't like his soldiers protecting him? Protect him from what? They aren't fighting in his backyard, or yours. The ones who need protecting are the innocents caught in the crossfire in THEIR own backyards.

And you can't save the world by raping the bad guy.However, this doesn't explain why regular sex, something associated with love, it usually seen as worse than violence in pop culture. Mass Effect, a game about shooting people in the face, was fine until it gave you the option to have sex. Tons of parents are willing to let their children see all the death and violence they want, yet are afraid of letting them anywhere near boobs.

Murder on the other hand usually involves killing a helpless victim, where the victim in question is usually not fighting back or simply trying to get away from you. Being brutally murdered is usually worse than being raped, you want to know how I know; ask any woman if she would rather be raped or brutally murdered. 9/10 I think they'll pick the rape and rape surly is the lesser of the 2 evils once you throw in mass homicide.

For instance I can go on a kill crazy rampage killing innocent pedestrians in the street in GTA and end with punching a hooker to death, are you telling me that's worse then any 1 rape? I don't even have to be playing a M rated game to do this many Teen rated games like Infamous let me kill innocent pedestrians.

You're right we are all going to die, but we are not all going to be murdered, there are people who survived attempted murders and horrific tragedies like mass shootings as well who probably get reminded of there life altering event from violent video games, but ignoring the topic or or removing innocent killings in video games isn't going to make it go away. No one is going to play a game full of rape when they themselves have just been raped, just like no one is going to play a game where the objective to to shoot innocent people when they themselves were just victims of a similar assault.

I also disagree with you on the fact that we are all comfortable with the concept of Murder, there are many more people being shot around the world then being raped and the victim being shot and killed aren't always seen as faultless. How meant times have you heard the phrase "He was a drug addict it was only a matter of time" or " He shouldn't have been there"

Brutally killing an innocent person in cold blood isn't any less sleazy or has any less the need to victimize than rape in fact just the opposite. Not every serial killer is a rapist, yes rape usually makes things worse but it's usually just the frosting on the murder cake. Take for example the Ice Truck killer in Dexter, he never raped his victims he just tied them up and cut their body parts off while they were still alive, you think that's honestly worse than being raped and left alive in one piece?

And here i disagree slightly. While i don't want to argue about wether rape is a bad thing, which it certainly is, there can be countless situations in which rape can be sort of justified, once you remember that we are talking about games. Just imagine the following videogame: You control a protagonist named "John", living in a random fantasy world. John is the chosen one to save the world from the total destruction by the hands of an evil god named "Bob". And the only way to defeat Bob is by charging a magical artifact with enough energy to banish him. And now imagine the only way to charge the artifact is to rape other people. While this is indeed a very silly plot(Although not the worst i've ever seen), this could be a 100% real videogame, since it's a GAME and can thus contain any idea or plot, how unrealistic they might be. I believe that everyone who would have to choose between raping a few people and letting a whole world go to hell, would think a very long time about that. In this case we hae an example of a rape that could be seen as necessary, and by the way this example is not even glorifying the rape. the protagonist itself knows its awful, yet he may have to do it. So all in all, i believe in a videogame there is nothing that can't be justified, by adjusting the parameters the world operates on. When even in the real world it is acceptable that soldiers kill other humans to prevent them from killing others, then in a videogame it logically has to be acceptable to rape to prevent the apocalypse of an entire planet or universe.

Also you asked why there's no tips to not rape someone? Well you said it yourself that people think of rapists as animalistic monsters, and if they are animalistic monsters they probably wouldn't be swayed by asking them nicely.

That's the wrong question. The proper one should be: Why should we censor it?

For example if you have a dark fantasy game where you play the bad guy, why shouldn't you be able to rape and plunder your neighboring villages? Could be a great game mechanic, changing troop morals and how other nations might see you. Such a game could be as cartoony as Dungeon Keeper or as authentic as a Paradox simulation.

Essentially, stop thinking like Japanese porn is the only way to use rape in games. Rape has been used tons of times in books, movies and so on, there is no reason why it shouldn't be part of gaming. Even such tame shows as StarTrek/TNG/Enterprise had numerous episodes covering it in one way or another.

Also this whole discussion is just a little late: Phantasmagoria had rape 15 years ago and it was written by a women (Roberta Williams) no less.

...No...

The question is...Why did you ever include this in the first place?

Because we wanted to.

If that's not good enough then: because it's fun being evil in a video game.

I know I'm late to the party but I just discovered Jimquisition (through your Alien 3 video) and I want to add just a tiny bit from myself.

About your "blame a rape victim" argument. It's not exactly that, well some people perhaps do put entire blame on the victim but it's not like that for all (or at least for me). Please note, that I in no way I'm trivializing perpetrator fault nor defending him/her. No matter the circumstances, ones that commit rape are bad and deserve severe punishment. No, this is about how I feel about the victim. But first, let's estabilish one thing. I'm a prick, I hate people as a species (misantrophy or whatever it's called) and I love offensive jokes (yep, any joke, including rape-joke, is fine in my book). That being sad, rape is like the only thing that makes me feel legitimately sorry for a human being (still won't stop from telling stupid rape-jokes in the close vicinity of a victim but that's always something). Except when it's the so called "grey area" rape (ofcourse there is no grey area but for the sake of the argument let's say there is).We live in dangerous world. We don't like that but that's the way it is. It's a fact you have to accept. So when you're going to a club dressed like a slut or when you're obviously leading on drooling guy (hardcore example the "Just the tip" game) and you get raped, don't expect much sympathy from me. You knew the risk. The perpetrator is ofcourse 100% guilty and should be severly punished. It's just that I won't be sorry for you. I'm not justyfying this kind of rape. It just won't make me feel bad. It's like when you going near a road there is a risk you're going to be run down be a car. It's not nice but it happens.Also, most civilised world is "democratic" and statistically five out of six people enjoy gang rape

Also about rape in video games. If done with good writing and is well incorporated into the story it's ok. Ok, it would be nice if your character wouldn't get raped and if you're the one doing raping, there should always be an option to not do it. Then it would be truly ok. Eg. G-Senjou no Maou. One path allows you to rape one girl but you don't have to do it. And I didn't because I couldn't bring myself to choose that option.

DVS BSTrD:You don't rape in self-defense.I could defend a game with rape IN it but not a game that is ABOUT rape.

Maybe people with a strong fetishes like rape can use such adult games to satisfy their sexual lust without actually harming anyone. If they didn't have such things like rape in porn(fake ofc), and these games are basically porn(like Tentacle Bento), to satisfy this sexual desire, some people might do it in real life than keeping it a fantasy.

Other example would be pedophiles. Just imagine that the only thing you can satisfy your sexual desire(get a hard one) with are little boys or girls. Of course most normal people would surpress that desire. Being pedophilic doesn't mean that you already raped a child. But if those men can't have an outlet like DRAWN child abuse or porn with 18 year olds looking a lot younger the probability that they at some point give in to the desire is a lot greater. Again I'm not talking about real videos of children or people getting raped. But those fictional things shouldn't harm anyone. If you don't like it don't watch it. If you don't like seeing tentacle monsters raping innnocent girls than don't look at it and don't support games like "Tentacle Bento" on Kickstarter, but leave people who enjoy it alone.And just because Tentacle Bento(actually first time I've seen that game) might depict rape in a cute way and the girls will probably start enjoying the rape mere seconds after(that's the way Hentai works), doesn't mean that anyone liking it takes real life rape as a light thing to do.